


the dread and envy of them all

by x_los



Category: David Copperfield - Fandom
Genre: Activism, Age of Sail, Alternate Universe - Navy, British Empire, China, Colonialism, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Marriage, Military, Navy, Opium, Post-Colonial, Regret, Unrequited Love, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 02:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21007886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: "The nations, not so blest as thee,Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;While thou shalt flourish great and free,The dread and envy of them all."





	the dread and envy of them all

_ 'I say, aunt,' I interposed, 'that I must do something!' _

_ 'Go for a soldier, do you mean?' returned my aunt, alarmed; 'or go to sea? I won't hear of it. You are to be a proctor. We're not going to have any knockings on the head in THIS family, if you please, sir.' _

***

When David Copperfield was yet a child, he’d stayed in Yarmouth with his nurse Peggotty in her family home: an old boat, converted into a fishermen’s cottage. By association, David had come to regard the sea as something like a near relation. When he’d contemplated taking flight from his brutal indentures at Murdstone’s factory, David had considered turning to that relative for some provision. The same scheme had idly occurred to him when he’d first cast about for a career as an educated young man. But David’s family had often proved unreliable, and sometimes even cruel. He ought to have remembered that, when he once more looked to this familiar potential benefactor. He’d been born with a caul, protected against drowning and set down to lead a charmed life. Such a boy ought by rights to go for a sailor, so as not to let a blessing go to waste. But David had also been born at the unluckiest hour going, and for every good turn fate had given him, he’d already seen more than his share of misfortune. 

Betsey Trotwood hadn’t liked the idea, which ought to have been the end of it. But when Doctor Strong had, by chance, heard of the matter from Agnes Wickfield, and thought to offer to purchase his favourite pupil a commission, even as he had done for Jack Maldon (who he liked far less, and who he’d seen less potential in), David’s aunt had grudgingly allowed herself to be brought ‘round to the notion. To enlist as an officer was a different matter than finding oneself pressed as a common sailor, to be sure. Perhaps this would be the making of young Trot.

Time had softened Betsey Trotwood, but some protective hardness is only too well-justified. If she had more keenly remembered the early hurt that had made her constitutionally distrustful, she’d never had set her crucial stamp of approval upon the business. 

Uriah Heep himself, the very architect of David’s loss of fortune, felt a stab of anxiety when the topic was first broached in his presence. Agnes didn’t like the idea much better than Uriah did, but was far better at resigning herself to disappointment. She hadn’t liked to speak of it--especially before her father, who took any mention of Betsey Trotwood’s misfortune so much to heart. 

“Is he really thinking of that?” Uriah asked, rubbing his hand on his lank chin. Surely he wasn’t--not seriously, And if he were, why, his friends should certainly dissuade ‘im! Copperfield was too much a gentleman ever to sink so below his native element. 

Agnes frowned at him. “Why Uriah, I believe he is already committed, and has even embarked.” She shook her head at Uriah’s nakedly shocked expression. “When Trotwood sets out to do a thing, he wastes little time and spares no energy.”

Uriah supposed he’d known it. Yet it unnerved him to have his customary means of adjustment stripped away by forces he’d no possible sway over. It had only been a month since he’d sprung his trap. Yet say what he liked and scheme as might, he’d never pull back the tide and recall that ship. The British navy cared nothing for anything he might do, and it now owned David Copperfield for a fixed term of years. And not a word had been said to Uriah of any of this. Apparently David had bid farewell to Agnes the very day Strong’s commission had met with his aunt’s blessing: within a scant week of his dispossession. 

Uriah was wakefull all that night, turning in his hard bed like a joint sizzling on a spit. Bitterly, he thought how very smart Copperfield must look in his blue and cream first-lieutenant's uniform, with a score of polished brass buttons shining on ‘im, bright as his eyes. This would come easily to Copperfield, as all things did. He’d make a lark of it, writing Agnes with account of his thrilling adventures on the high seas. He’d be wooed on the very first night by three brave, handsome, eminently competent officers, and have his pick of suitors (for wasn’t that vice said to be prevalent in the navy, right along with rum and the lash?). He’d settle in Bengal and never, ever come home. 

He might well never see David Copperfield again. Uriah could hardly imagine that. From their childhood up until just a few months ago, he’d seen David every day. Beautiful, unobtainable, and so perfect Uriah had always ached to ruin David’s life, just so he might mean something to him, and might render him less painful to look on. And so he had done, it seemed. Uriah bit his lip until it nearly bled. Who would he crow over now? What was the whole of his vicious revenge for, if David Copperfield would never see it and acknowledge Uriah’s power? Uriah began to suspect he’d been just clever enough to scupper himself. He was taking on water, sinking as he began to dimly realise that his imaginings did not quite encompass all that might become of Copperfield now. 

Worse things than David being happy far away could certainly happen, and they did. The course of David’s profound disillusionment with his new career took him less than a year to traverse to the end. David’s initial nervous anticipation faded in the face of the engaging difficulty of mastering his new role and acquainting himself with his new circumstances. Clever, energetic Lt. David Copperfield was soon respected and popular, poised to climb the ranks accordingly, as neatly and adroitly as he learned to scale the rigging. And despite the privations incumbent on his new role, David enjoyed the camaraderie of his new friends and the challenges of the work. 

But it was 1840, and David twenty, and the Chinese government had at last decisively acted to prevent the British empire’s illegal importation of the opium which financially and physically innervated her citizens. The Emperor’s deputee destroyed over two and a half million tons of British narcotics. In the teeth of loud objections from her own citizens, Britain acted to avenge the destruction of her capitalists’ hateful stock with Chinese blood. English too, if necessary. 

It proved necessary. David Copperfield made a formal, public complaint about the undertaking. He didn’t believe any of this was worthy of them. He was not insubordinate or uncivil, but he was passionate and clear. Nevertheless, he maintained his professional composure during the naval siege of Chusan Island. Only one British soldier was wounded, and twenty five Chinese officers were killed. It was an evil, stupid business, but a man could bear it. Worse happened in London’s slums inside any given fortnight. 

But during the next months, five hundred British soldiers died of malaria and dysentery while waiting in a swamp for reinforcements. David himself was rendered an invalid for some weeks. He was promoted due to casualties while still one himself. Together with his comrades, he rallied at the supply of fresh troops from India and a cutting-edge new iron steamer. He didn’t realise, not _ fully, _ that this would herald the resumption of more aggressive slaughter. The Pearl River campaign sickened him worse than any illness. Almost 300 men died in a day at Chuenpi, when the Chinese junks were ripped apart by canon-shot. Some outright committed suicide rather than be taken, believing that the invading barbarians would show them still less mercy. The bodies bobbed in the water, dotted everywhere, submerging as keels pushed past only to bob up again. 

David had only ever read about war in children’s books and Rule Britannia broadsheets. Staring into its wine-dark mouth, the swallowing sea that consumed the souls of men and their bodies with them, he knew no bright cause could make this noble and clean--still less the financial interests of English men, who used even their own kind as hatefully as this wherever they could. The navy was nominally tasked with prosecuting any vessel engaged in the international slave trade. Yet here David and his fellows were, serving at the pleasures of slavers of another sort, tasked with thwarting the efforts of decent men to keep their fellows safe from pernicious vice and their sovereignty their own. 

David had left England adoring Dora Spenlow beyond reason. At first he’d written devotedly to her every day, pouring his heart and thoughts out for pages at great expense and only becoming a less faithful correspondent when he’d become seriously ill. But Dora had never truly had the patience for letters. Her own had been slight affairs, which showed little evidence of her having read his. The prospect of a long engagement had winnowed at her honest regard for David, and his absence itself had been the final nail in the coffin of their innocent love. When Dora apprised him that she’d undertaken another engagement, David despised himself for being unable to banish from his mind a suspicion that this was for the best, after all. He still held her image in his heart and thought it lovely. He yet esteemed her childlike graces very highly. David loved the memory of their brief, earnest ardour. But he doubted that he could ever forget all he’d seen of the bitterness of the world, and never wished Dora to know any of that. For his own part, David expected he always would be a melancholy fellow, now. When he thought of the future (which was seldom enough), he wished for a partner who could understand the fact, if not why, and who wouldn’t grudge him his spells of dourness. 

The matter was smoothed over and hushed up by David’s friends (his popularity had ever stood him in good stead), but David Copperifeld, now a first lieutenant, was discharged in 1841, and it ought to have been dishonorably. Ordered to reinforce the army during the Sanyuanli Incident and to fire on the 20,000 Chinese villagers who’d taken up arms against the invaders, David outright refused. He let himself instead be taken to the brig in deepest disgrace. Common sailors, who could not strike an officer even accidentally, on pain of death, exercised their patriotic zeal and boiling anger by subjecting him to gross abuse. David had been gentle as an officer, and was sympathetic even now to their distress, but it counted for little in the hot atmosphere of conflict. 

Upon his return to England, David attempted to explain his refusal to fight. Even many he’d thought friends could not understand him, seeing his desertion of his duty as shameful cowardice. David wondered whether he himself would have thought the same, once. He couldn’t even entirely hate the David Copperfield who might have done just that. For a start, he suspected he would have made any such judgment based off partial, misleading information. Not a soul he spoke to had known that the peasants had rioted after a villager’s wife had been violated by an English soldier. 

David came back a man, chastened and serious, full of a righteous anger that made him a committed campaigner against imperial aggression. He’d paid a great price for his knowledge. His very wrists were scarred from the attempt he’d made one bleak night while imprisoned for the duration of the voyage home to end his own life, unable to forget his part in having taken others’. Only acting to put things right, and to bring more good into the world than he’d done harm, gave David purpose and peace. 

Uriah waited upon David almost the instant he set foot in London. He tried telling himself that he’d relish seeing David brung low--not only gone for a sailor, but evidently a failure in it! But Uriah swiftly realised he’d broken some part of David that could never be repaired. David hardly roused himself even to evidence his old dislike of Uriah, and he didn’t look at Uriah when they spoke anymore--not  _ really _ . His gaze was a thousand miles away, and his once swift replies were now measured. He no longer wasted time on idle talk, and Uriah Heep’s provocations were not to the purpose. David didn’t cry when he spoke about what he’d undergone, but Uriah thought it would have been better if he  _ had. _

It seemed Uriah had destroyed perhaps his favourite thing in all the world--the thing he himself had thought finest, too terribly fine to bear. He’d thought at least to luxuriate in David’s sumptuous misery, but even that simply wasn’t there to be enjoyed. David’s love for all mankind had grown after the model of Christ, but his capacity for fine sentiment had been blunted. He was so much less human and so much less himself than he’d once been. If the man David now was was good, did good, Uriah couldn’t help but think that there might have been a David who improved the world after a different fashion, whilst retaining more of the intricacy of his own precious soul. Only seeing the ruin of David at his hands could have taught Uriah how much he would have been willing to forgive him, and how precious David’s lost qualities had been.

In some ways Uriah suspected they were closer to understanding one another now than they ever had been. David had seen past civility, had looked under it and found, slick and squirming, the commonplace cruelties it entailed. In their shared opposition to the enabling assumptions of a society predicated first on violence and second on rendering all who it hurt invisible, there was a sympathy between them. Yet Uriah found David’s being like him more terrible than he’d imagined he could find anything. 

Agnes Wickfield didn’t seem to register the devastating loss. If anything, she seemed to find David’s hard maturation an improvement, and to love him all the better for being a sober, sucked-dry version of himself, whose kindness came from duty and not the fertile upwelling of his once overgrown, now too-disciplined heart. Uriah thought  _ that _ absolutely typical of her. Agnes Copperfield dutifully sealed her husband’s appeals to ministers not to meet the Sepoy Mutiny with violence. Uriah showed his own duty by managing to subtly return the bulk of Copperfield’s estate. He couldn’t fix much else, and he supposed this was as good a thing to spend the money on as any. Uriah had eased up on his partner after Copperfield enlisted. There wasn’t any point to it. He had what we wanted, and he knew now that he couldn’t control the consequences of his own ambition. Safer to stop while he could. Hadn’t he done enough as it was? For all his striving, it seemed he’d wreaked the greatest revenge on himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Dickens sent a particularly shiftless son abroad to join the army just in time to participate in First War of Independence (also known as the Indian Mutiny, etc.) in 1857. Guilty and protective, he sent a terrible, racist, violent private letter to his friend Angela Burdett Coutts during the hostilities. It was unworthy of him, and casts shame on his often vital, often beautiful criticism of human rights abuses, revealing how little he personally, viscerally knew about what he was talking about it--revealing, I think, the luxury of that ability to be distant and ignorant of what your own country is up to in the world. It's a level of stupid cruelty he'd only reach one other time in his life, when, at the behest of the widow of the captain responsible and unable or unwilling to believe British sailors could be so monstrously ill-prepared, incompetent and cruel as to resort to cannibalism, he theorised the local Inuit tribes might have been to blame for the disastrous failure of a polar exhibition. Again, one can understand the emotional logic: no one was less prepared to believe this of his countrymen. Again, it was beneath him--all the more so for having entered the public discourse, where it could do damage to already-dehumanised and dispossessed people.
> 
> So I guess I'm still mad, and needed to write about it. 
> 
> The riots in question have an important place in Chinese histories and emotional-political narratives. Like everything but the Tudors and WWII, they go completely unmentioned in contemporary British history education, which is in general about as useful as a third tit.


End file.
